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The last miracle but one performed by the metalworker who became president of Brazil on January 1st 2003, was to pass on his enormous popularity to an almost unknown woman called Dilma Rousseff. Two years ago, in October 2008, only 8.4% of the population said they intended to vote for her; by 2009 the number had risen to 14%. Next Sunday the candidate chosen by Lula will receive half the nation’s votes and could become the first woman president in Brazilian history. Only the magic of Lula can explain her dramatic rise.

But it is Lula’s final miracle that reveals how successful his government has been. Petrobras, the partly nationalized state oil company has just attracted the largest input of new capital in its history - 70 billion dollars worth of new shares. Brazil has become a world power, and it is the only one of the BRIC quartet (Brazil, Russia,India, China) to combine a powerful industrial sector with self-sufficiency in energy. By 2014 it will become a major exporter of crude, thanks to the discovery over the last ten years of major new oil deposits under a thick layer of salt over 5000 metres below the ground 300 kilometres off its coast.

The two events have one thing in common - a political strategy that restored a key role to the State. When Lula came to power in 2003, the poorest people did not vote for him, for fear of radical changes that would create instability.When he entered the presidency he set in motion the Family Plan, a programme that transferred money to families earning less than $82 a month – some 50 million people in a population of 190 million. Although the amount of cash was minimal – between $13 and $117 per family – it was enough to stave off hunger and reduce the levels of extreme poverty.

More importantly he raised the minimum wage by an enormous 54% in real terms, discounting inflation.These measures, together with a significant increase in exports – soya, meat, iron ore to China – transformed Brazil from a country of poor people into a society of the middle classes. Class C, earning between three and ten times the minimum wage, grew from 37% to 50% of the population. Some 25 million were lifted out of poverty to become consumers. These people are Lula’s social base.

The 50 million historically poor fell to 30 million in eight years, are receiving Stae subsidies and dream of rising into the middle class. Almost half of them have made it. They adore Lula, though they have only recently begun to vote for his Workers Party (PT). For the first time the left has a majority among the poor and marginalized. And yet, as the sociologist Rudá Ricci, author of Lulismo points out, the middle class that emerged from poverty over the last ten years professes religious and family values and does not participate in social movements. “ It consists of people who do not read and are entirely pragmatic”, Ricci explains.

The State directs the economy without strangling it. While the populism of Getulio Vargas created state enterprises in key areas in the fifties, Lula’s government has worked to strengthen Brazilian private capital. Through the National Economic and Social Development Bank, the largest development bank in the world, it has promoted mergers between large firms competing in the world market. These are the ‘Brazilian multinationals’ like Petrobras, Odebrecht, Embraer, Vale do Rio Doce and the Itaú-Unibanco and Bradesco banks.

Nevertheless, the account of Lula’s eight years must also recognize weaknesses in a country aspiring to global power status. The first is that its economic strength rests on the export of commodities on a massive scale, with no added value or technological input. Secondly, Brazil remains one of the most unequal countries in the world; 20,000 families control 46% of the wealth, and 1% of landowners possess 44% of all the land. Third, its armed forces, charged with the defence of the Amazon and the world’s fifth largest oil reserves, are extremely weak. But Lula has developed an excellent relationship with the armed forces; he is the first president since the military regimes of 1964-85 to promote widespread rearmament, including nuclear submarines and the latest generation of hunter planes.

Lula will remain active in politics in the years to come, directing Rousseff’s steps from the shadows. It will not be easy. Internally the government rests on a complex alliance of ten parties, ranging from the communist party to the centre-right. Regionally, it must consolidate Unasur (the Union of South American Nations) which embraces governments as different as Venezuela and Bolivia on the one hand and Peru and Colombia on the other. But in the last eight years, Lula has already achieved the hardest part.

For the first twenty years of my life I was a witness to the slow construction of the house where my family lived; we all took part in the process. Against the background of a mass invasion of immigrants from the countryside, whose needs were very specific – like housing – the construction of my house, of my colonia (my district) began in the sixties, in an area of volcanic rock (Pedregales de Coyoacan) in the south of Mexico City. It had never been included in any plans for the expansion of the city, if any such plan existed.

The materials and the techniques we used were almost entirely improvised, based on whatever was available in the immediate surroundings; the context was a time of general economic and social instability, not just in Mexico, but probably across the world. The solutions we found arose from concrete needs in concrete situations, like building an extra room, modifying a roof, improving or changing or eliminating one space or another.

Because it was built with no funding and no architectural plan, today the house looks chaotic, almost unusable; yet every detail, every corner has a reason to be where it is. The house is a true labyrinth, polished by the simultaneous patina of construction, use and destruction.

This self-building, the term generally used for this type of construction, has to be seen as a process full of human warmth and solidarity among neighbours and relatives. It is important not just as collaboration, as shared capital, but also as an enriching learning environment for everyone who is part of a community, helping them to understand their own circumstances.

The series of works which make up the Self-Building project begin by seeing the house as a whole, its details and improvised techniques born of the organic need to create a human habitat by any means necessary, a space which becomes spontaneous, contradictory and unstable as it progresses. The references whose starting point is the observation of the house are also transformed, in an equally unstable way, into obstacles, debris, constraints, leaps and jumps, tremors and unevennesses, falling materials, ricochets, cracks and disappearances which appeal to what is local in the form of a somatic consciousness of the immediate, the urgent, of a physical presence in time and space, multiple and simultaneous.

Many of these works express my wish to confront two or more radically different economic systems, creating hybrid marriages and unexpected combinations of materials and techniques.

The tehcnical details of construction are not represented; only the diverse dynamics involved are reproduced, their socio-economic context a kind of scaffolding across which I move.

Even when particular pieces in isolation might recall figuratively the basic structure of ‘a house’, rather than simply presenting models of poor people’s architecture, my main purpose is to generate knowledge and understanding of how human activity produces forms, trying to renew for my own purposes a significant vehicle for invention and creation.

On another level, and like a silent sound track of time and space, the sculptures I have made are accompanied by an equally contradictory accumulation of information translated into drawings, photographs, images in movement and sounds taken from books, music, other images and my own life experiences.

Collections of movie posters, crossed out images from newspapers and postcards, fragments of video, songs and ballads, and texts stolen from my own reading are some of the combinations that I have shared to provide testimony of my cosmos. All these fragments are the stones and bricks carved by hand to form the walls, roofs and floors of my house.

To construct the total image of my whole self I have collected things in the manner of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, as a cumulative and affectionate search for expressive signs wherever I go.

Buckminster Fuller said that materials should be organized by sympathy, a concept that I apply to my collections of objects, images and sounds as well as my three-dimensional work.

Through minimal transformations, with no explanations or stories and possibly even without much skill, my work is the proof that I am alive. In my work the transformation of information, materials and objects comprises the definitively unfinished construction of my own identity, as a way of approaching reality. By way of facts.

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Translation education

Other - Professor,University of Glasgow

Experience

Years of translation experience: 48. Registered at ProZ.com: Jan 2010.